D6. Being Born Again.

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We do not yet know the full meaning or value of life.

 

The commonly held idea of existence runs thus: to be born—to grow from infancy to youth, from youth to maturity, from maturity to old age, from old age to death. During these stages to gain possibly fame or fortune, but ever at the end to weaken, sicken and die.

 

Man’s real and ever‑growing life is a condition so unlike this present existence, that there is scarcely a possibility of any realization thereof by comparison between the two. If you had never seen anything of a tree but its roots in the dark, damp ground, could any one by means of words convey to you a realization of the beauty of its foliage and blossoms in the sunlight?

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Our physical existence is the root, from which in the future is to come an indescribable beauty and power.

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Some speak lightly of their bodies, call them incumbrances and entertain glowing anticipations when being rid of them of a blissful life, entirely in the spiritual realm of existence.

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This involves an error. Because a certain physical life with ever refining physical senses is in every stage of existence a necessity to the fullest completement of our lives.

 

Re‑incarnated we all have been many times. Regeneration is a step beyond re‑incarnation.

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Re‑incarnation means the total loss of one physical body and the getting of a new one through the aid of another organization.

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Regeneration means the perpetuation of an ever‑refining physical body without that total separation of spirit and body called death.

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The cruder the spirit, the longer were the intervals of time between its getting for itself a new physical body through re‑incarnation.

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As the spirit was quickened and gained power, these intervals became less in duration, numbering years in place of centuries. With still greater increase of power the spirit will seek the regenerative instead of the re‑incarnative process of perpetuating its life of the physical senses.

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A spiritualizing and refining power has ever been and ever will be working on this planet. It has through innumerable ages changed all forms of being, whether mineral, animal or vegetable, from coarse to finer types. It works with man as with all other organizations. It is ever changing him gradually from a material to a more spiritual being. It is carrying him through his many physical existences from one degree of perfection to another. It has in store for him new powers, new lives and new methods of existence. That spiritual power has given him in the past new inventions. It illuminated his mind to see the uses of steam, electricity and other material agencies. But far greater illumination is to come. A time is coming when he will need neither iron nor steam nor electricity to promote his convenience or enjoyment. New powers born out of his spiritual life will supersede the necessity of many of his present material aids.

 

There will come in the future a more perfected life, when for the few at first, and the many afterward, there will be no physical death.

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In other words, every spirit will be able to use both its spiritual and physical senses, through the continual regeneration of its physical body.

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Such making over and over again of the physical body will come of successive changes of mind. There will be continual separations from one old state of mind after another and entrances into new. We shall ever be through regeneration born into new individualities.

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Regeneration will supersede re‑incarnation, because of our coming into a higher order of life, or receiving and being built of a higher order of thoughts. The spirit will then be ever changing, the physical body for one still finer and more spiritualized.

 

Indeed, the whole aim and scope of all these writings is the endeavor to show what life really means; how the spiritual life rules the physical life, and how we are all growing from cruder to finer forms of life.

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Life is an eternal series of regenerations. The spirit is regenerated when it shakes off the old physical body. It shakes off an old body because it is tired of carrying an instrument it cannot express itself through. The old man or woman of decaying powers has as much mind or spirit as ever. But that mind cannot act on its body. It is cut off in a sense from that body. It is receding from that body and will finally quit it altogether. It recedes, because through ignorance it has been drawing for years inferior thought and a monotonous round of thought to the body and endeavoring to make it over again with old rotten material. It is like trying to repair a leaky roof with rotten shingles. This is the degenerative process of to‑day and the cause of decaying physical power and death of the body.

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But the more enlightened spirit will find out how to act on and replenish the body with newer and newer thought. This makes the body ever newer and newer and so keeps up the necessary connection between spirit and body.

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We do not part with life in the loss of the physical body. But we do lose thereby one kind of life, and a most important agency for the fullest enjoyment of life.

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We lose in what is called death, the use of that set of senses we call the physical. We lose the power of living, in a close connection with the world of physical things. It is most desirable to maintain a connection with the physical world, and the spirit on losing its body contrary to general belief laments the loss of such body and desires eagerly to have the possession and use of its former physical senses. Failing in this it uses so much as it can by a psychological law the physical senses of those having bodies, whom it can influence or control.

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Every living man and woman has such influence brought to bear on him or her from the unseen side of life.

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The “dead,” as they are falsely called, resume imperfectly their lives on earth, through aid unconsciously given them by the living, or more properly speaking, by those living with physical bodies.

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If we do not wish to find out the new—if we instantly reject what some may call “new fangled ideas”—if we want to go on in the old way as our fathers, then we invite the company and mind of spirits as ignorant as ourselves, who will only help on the decay of our bodies after getting from them all the use they can.

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These are “unregenerated spirits.” They have drawn to them little new thought since losing their bodies. They will by reason of the same ignorance through which they lost the last physical body be drawn into another re‑incarnation, and perhaps another and another, until at last gaining with each life more knowledge, they will know how to regenerate their bodies.

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This regeneration will not come of any material medicines or methods. It will come of changing spiritual conditions. These spiritual conditions will cause the adoption of new habits and ways of life. But to adopt these habits before the spiritual conditions prompts or demands them, will do little good.

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We have a life of the physical senses. We have another of the finer or spiritual senses. We live during the waking hours by the physical senses. We live another life during sleep by the spiritual senses. When these two lives are properly adjusted they feed each other healthfully.

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With such proper adjustment the physical senses receive certain necessary supply of element from the spiritual while the body sleeps.

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The spiritual being receives also from the material condition certain vital supply. If your spirit loses its body these sources of mutual supply between body and spirit are for a time cut off.

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The more perfected or regenerated life of the future means the consciousness of existence by both the physical and spiritual senses.

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The life of the physical senses and that of the spiritual senses are necessary to each other. When they are joined together and we become conscious of the use of both, life is relatively perfected, and the spirit attains a degree of happiness not now to be imagined.

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During all the centuries which have passed since Christ’s time, can we point to any instance of this new birth or regeneration? If such regeneration is owing to a higher Faith and higher Law, can we say that any person, no matter what may have been their reputation for piety or uprightness whose bodies have finally sickened and decayed have lived up to the Highest Law?

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“The wages of sin are death,” says the Bible. We would prefer to say the result of an unperfected life is the death of the physical body.

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The body of every weak, shriveled, trembling old man or woman is to‑day the result of sins committed in ignorance. Those sins lay in their thoughts. Out of such thought as it attracts the spirit builds first its spiritual body. The physical body is a material correspondence of the spiritual body. If the spirit believes in error it builds that error into the body. The result is decay.

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For this result no blame can be imputed to those who suffer. They have lived up to all the light and knowledge they had. With more growth there will in some condition of existence come to them more knowledge. They will then see new methods of living and avoid the mistakes of the former less perfected life.

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Charity comes of the knowledge that all people live up to the best light they have. God alone can light up the darkened chambers of our and their minds. When we, leaving the faults of others alone, ask that our minds be illuminated so as to see and avoid evil, that illumination alone will help all about us.

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People weary of existence, because they think year after year the same set of thoughts and ideas over and over again. Eternal life and happiness comes of a perpetual flow to us of new thought and idea. Thought is food for our spiritual beings. Our physical bodies are not nourished on one monotonous kind of food from year to year. Feed the spirit with the same thought (or try to) from year to year and it becomes sick. The sick spirit makes the sick body.

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The Law of Eternal Life will not allow this repetition to go on. The Law says to us: “You were not made to run in ruts and grooves of fixed habit. You are not as John Smith or John Brown to be an eternal individuality without change, like a post rooted in the ground. You are to have a new mind for this period, and a superior mind with increased powers of perception for the next period. You are ever by drawing to you and adding to you new thought to be as so many different individuals as you live on, and as this process of regeneration goes on you are born or changed into successive types of being, each one being finer than the last.

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The regenerated life with a physical body means an ever increasing life. It means a fresher capacity with each day’s waking to sense that beauty in Nature which exists all around us. It means a new glory in each day’s sunshine. It means a repose and restfulness whereby we can sit still and feel the spirit which animates the tree, the leaf, the ocean, the rivulet, the star, the flower and every natural expression of the Infinite Mind. It means the daily flow to us of new thoughts which shall fill us with new life. It means that we shall rejoice in the realization and firmly grounded faith that we have in us the possibilities for development into numberless new lives. It means that power of so losing our material self in any effort we may make that all sense of time shall vanish and ennui and mental weariness shall be destroyed. It means power to live without drudgery of mind and body, or that anxiety which is even worse than drudgery. It means at last the getting of enjoyment from all things. To get enjoyment from everything is to get life from everything. To get life from everything is to get power from all things. To get power implies a control of all physical elements. This includes a power of ever holding an ever refining physical body.

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Ennui is sickness. When we don’t know what to do with ourselves, when we try to kill time and everything seems “flat, stale and unprofitable,” we have temporarily lost our bold of the Great Fountain of life, the Supreme Mind and Power. We are absorbing the wearied thought of thousands around us who think the same thing from day to day and from year to year, whose minds in their play are treadmills, and who are trying to get life exhilaration and variety entirely out of physical things.

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The true and regenerative life cannot be gotten from material things. That is the reason why all that money can buy fails to satisfy. The monster of discontent and ennui rages as much in the palace as the hovel. Solomon was in the claws of this beast when be said: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” That exclamation is a libel on the Infinite Mind. It came from the Jewish king, because be was trying to get life and happiness out of wood and stone and metal, and flesh and blood, and all things material. It cannot be done.

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But when through demand of the Supreme you get new thoughts the material thing of yesterday seems to you as a new thing of to‑day. The very rock you passed yesterday has a new idea associated with it to‑day. It may not be an idea you can put in words. It is something you feel rather than think. Myriads of thoughts coming at the physical sight of all material things about us are so felt, but can neither be talked out or written out.

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The regeneration of the body comes in response to our increasing demand of the Supreme Power to be led in the path of the Highest Wisdom. It comes of a courage gained at last of persistent demand whereby we shall dare to trust entirely to that power. This it is doubtful if any can do at present. We try to trust in God, but when the pinch comes and things look dark, we are tempted to adopt some of our worn‑out material methods for averting the evil. But perfect trust in the Supreme Power can gradually come to us. When it does men will become more than mortal.

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Whoever attains to such perfect trust will be regenerated.

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Demand then new thoughts and an increasing nearness to the Supreme Mind, and in time you receive new life, and all things about you are for you, imbued with new life, or idea. You are then in the line of the regenerative process. Your spirit, as well as your body, is being born again and again. It is drawing to it ever new ideas and becomes literally a new spirit, a new being.

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If the spirit is being thus renewed or regenerated the body must be also.

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As we become more spiritualized, as the material mind gives place more and more to the Spiritual Mind; in other words, as the regenerative process goes on, we shall from time to time find ourselves prompted to change many of our habits and modes of life. These changes will involve eating, sleeping and association.

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But we need not try to force these changes on ourselves. The regenerative process will involve the eating of less and less animal food, until we shall eat none whatever. But there would be nothing gained from ceasing to eat meat before the desire for it had gone.

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The regenerative process will impel us at times to seek solitude, because when alone with Nature the spirit absorbs and assimilates a finer quality of thought. But to enforce on ourselves the solitude of the hermitage or cloister when there is no real love for it does little good, as is proven by the fact that hermit and recluse have physically decayed and died like the rest.

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This regeneration of the body will come to no one directly from any system of forms, habits or observances. It will come because of a time ripe for it to come. As this planet ripens spiritually all material things upon it partake of that ripening or development. The life of to‑day, so different and superior to that of five hundred or a thousand years ago, is a part and a proof of that development. The earth ripened first from chaos to the coarse development in the animal and vegetable kingdoms of ages ago, and then to its present relatively more refined condition. But this refining process is never to cease.

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Perhaps you will say on reading this, “What has all this to do with me?” What you say may be true. But it is all too far off, too indefinite. I want something to benefit me now.”

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This idea of the body’s regeneration is for you a benefit now, if you can accept it. It cannot be displaced from your mind. It will first, as a tiny seed, stay there. It may for months or years show no sign of life and seem to be forgotten. But it will grow and have more and more of a place in your thought. It will gradually change the quality of your thoughts. It will gradually force out an old and false interpretation of life and bring in a new one. It will impel you to look ever forward to newer joys and make you cease groping among regrets and sad remembrances of your past, when you know that such thoughts bring decay and death to the body. We are built literally of our thoughts. When we realize that our regrets, our envyings and jealousies, our borrowings of trouble, or our morbid contemplations of subjects, ghastly and sickly, are literally things, and bad things, actually put in our bodies, as such thoughts materializing themselves from invisible to visible element turn into flesh and blood, and that as so built into ourselves they bring us pains, aches, weakness, sickness, wrinkles, bowed backs, weak knees and failing powers, we have a good and tangible reason for getting rid of them.

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The body of a person given over to melancholy will be literally built of gloomy thoughts materialized into flesh and blood.

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When a girl realizes more and more clearly that jealousy, peevishness and pettish pouting moods will spoil her good looks and complexion, she will make efforts to rid herself of such thoughts. They will destroy her body. The Infinite Power for good wants all things and all people to be beautiful, healthful and symmetrical, and intends ever to increase this beauty, health and symmetry. It works through a continual process of regeneration to keep them so. If it cannot effect such perpetual life and beauty with one physical organization, it mercifully lets it go to pieces and gives the spirit another.

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When a man realizes that his angry mood or his covetous mood, or his grumbling mood represents so much material put in his body, and that such element will give his body pain and make it sick he has a good strong reason for having some care as to what his mind runs on and for making the “inside of the platter clean.”

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Let us remember so much as we can that every unpleasant thought is a bad thing literally put in the body. Are some people unpleasant to us? Do their airs or affectations, or their stinginess or dishonesty, or their domineering manners, or their coarseness and vulgarity offend us? Well, let us try and forget them! Why talk them over for an hour, holding the while all their disagreeable traits in our minds and think of them, may be for hours afterwards, when we know that these unpleasant images we carry in mind are things which are being literally put in our bodies to affect them injuriously and degenerate them. All such thoughts we must get rid of.

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Such riddance is the commencement of getting a new body. It is in the way of a literal regeneration. If through long habit we find we cannot by our own endeavor keep out of these injurious moods, if we find ourselves from time to time drawn into the current of tattle, or greed, or envy, we can cease all endeavor of our own and ask help of the Supreme Power to give us new and better thoughts. That Power, through our demand, will give us a new mind. The new mind will bring the new body.

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Q's note:

 

We came into each other's life to teach each other important lessons for Soul Growth and Healing.